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Literature Quotes and Sayings

Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound-1934

Every man’s memory is his private literature.
Aldous Huxley

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
G. K. Chesterton

The crown of literature is poetry.
William Somerset Maugham

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Literature is the question minus the answer.
Roland Barthes

He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
Joseph Heller

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
Italo Calvino

I doubt if anything learnt at school is of more value than great literature learnt by heart.
Richard

The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
Oscar Wilde-1891

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Mark Twain

What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us!
James Russell Lowell

Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music-the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
Henry Miller

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound

The test of real literature is that it will bear repetition. We read over the same pages again and again, and always with fresh delight.
Samual McChord Crothers

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
John Steinbeck

When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.
Clifton Fadiman

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
Alfred North Whitehead

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Henry James

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
C.S. Lewis

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.
Oscar Wilde

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
Virginia Woolf

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
Salman Rushdie

The duty of literature is to note what counts, and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference.
Anatole France

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
E.M. Forster

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can.
Samuel Lover

While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
Cyril Connolly

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